March 25, 1965: American religious and Civil Rights leader Dr. Before he could be taken to the hospital, John Lewis appeared before the television cameras calling on President Johnson to intervene in Alabama. Lewis’s skull was fractured, but he escaped across the bridge to a church in Selma. When the marchers stopped to pray, the police discharged tear gas and mounted troopers charged the demonstrators, beating them with nightsticks.

At the end of the bridge, they were met by Alabama state troopers, who ordered them to disperse. On Maa day that would become known as “Bloody Sunday” - Lewis and fellow activist Hosea Williams led over 600 marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. The following year, Lewis led one of the most dramatic protests of the era. In 1964, Lewis coordinated SNCC’s efforts for “Mississippi Freedom Summer,” a campaign to register black voters across the South. That historic violent day, which became known as “Bloody Sunday,” is widely acknowledged for galvanizing the nation’s leaders and ultimately yielding passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. At foreground right is John Lewis, Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, who is beaten by a state trooper. State troopers use clubs against participants of a civil rights voting march in Selma, Alabama on March 7, 1965. King’s celebrated “I Have a Dream” speech. He was one of the planners and keynote speakers of the March on Washington in August 1963, the occasion of Dr. Phillip Randolph, James Farmer and Roy Wilkins. By 1963, he was recognized as one of the “Big Six” leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, along with Dr. Lewis was one of the founding members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and served as its president from 1963 to 1966 when SNCC was at the forefront of the student movement for civil rights. John Lewis, age 23, speaks at the Lincoln Memorial during the historic March on Washington, August 28, 1963. In the Montgomery bus terminal, he was again attacked by a mob and brutally beaten. In 1961, Lewis joined fellow students on the Freedom Rides, challenging the segregation of interstate buses. (Photo by Jimmy Ellis)ĭay after day, Lewis and his fellow students sat silently at lunch counters where they were harassed, spat upon, beaten and finally arrested and held in jail, but they persisted in the sit-ins.

December 2, 1962: Nashville police officers carry John Lewis to the police wagon after he failed to obey orders to move away from Herschel’s Tic Toc restaurant during a sit-in protest against segregation. They began with sit-ins at segregated lunch counters. in Montgomery, Alabama announcing the Freedom Rides will continue.Īs a student he made a systematic study of the techniques and philosophy of nonviolence, and with his fellow students prepared thoroughly for their first actions. After attending segregated public schools in Pike County, Alabama, he graduated from the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, Tennessee and completed a bachelor’s degree in religion and philosophy at Fisk University. King and resolved to join the struggle for civil rights. in the Montgomery bus boycott, he corresponded with Dr. Inspired by the example of Rosa Parks and Dr.

(Bettman)įrom an early age, John Lewis was committed to the goal of education for himself, and justice for his people. Their words and actions inspired the young John Lewis.

John Lewis was born to a family of sharecroppers outside of Troy, Alabama, at a time when African Americans in the South were subjected to a humiliating segregation in education and all public facilities, and were effectively prevented from voting by systematic discrimination and intimidation.

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